Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text

Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory,Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text

Margaret J. M. Ezell*Texas A&M University

Abstract

Both the content and the physical nature of early modern women’s manuscript texts frequentlyraise significant issues for editors which are not addressed by either classical editorial theory setforth by Greg, Bowers, and Tanselle or the current principles and practices of editing manuscriptsas historical documents. ‘E-editions’ or electronic editions would appear to be the solution, butcurrent market-driven models of electronic editions and archives also have several important butlittle examined premises about what types of texts are suitable for such projects that are problem-atic when working with many early modern women’s manuscript texts.

This article is part of a Literature Compass special issue on ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-FirstCentury’.

The special issue is made up of the following pieces:

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Preface’, Regenia Gagnier,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 33–34, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00672.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Introduction’, Arthur F.Marotti, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 35–36, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00673.x.

‘Electronic Archives and Critical Editing’, Jerome McGann, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 37–42,doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00674.x.

‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Hans Walter Gabler, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 43–56, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00675.x.

‘Editing Without Walls’, Peter Robinson, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 57–61, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00676.x.

‘Our Affection for Books’, Susan J. Wolfson, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 62–71, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00677.x.

‘His Days Among the Dead Are No Longer Passed: Editing Robert Southey’, Lynda Pratt,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 72–81, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00678.x.

‘Different Demands, Different Priorities: Electronic and Print Editions’, Stuart Curran, LiteratureCompass 7.2 (2010): 82–88, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00679.x.

‘Editing Manuscripts in Print and Digital Forms’, Arthur F. Marotti, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010):89–94, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x.

‘All of the Above: The Importance of Multiple Editions of Renaissance Manuscripts’, Steven W.May, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 95–101, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00681.x.

‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the AccidentalCopy-Text’, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 102–109, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00682.x.

‘Different Strokes, Same Folk: Designing the Multi-form Digital Edition’, Daniel Paul O’Donnell,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 110–119, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00683.x.

Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 102–109, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00682.x

ª 2010 The AuthorJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – A Conclusion’, Laura Mandell,Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 120–133, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00684.x.

‘Special Issue: ‘‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’’ – Combined Bibliography’,Marotti et al., Literature Compass 7.2 (2010): 134–144, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00685.x.

Is there such a thing as feminist editorial theory? Google doesn’t seem to think so.Google reliably returns the results that while you can have feminist psychoanalytic theory,feminist literary theory, feminist film theory, feminist art history, feminist history, feministgeography, feminist philosophy, feminist economic theory, feminist legal theory, andfeminist sexology, feminist editorial theory is no where to be found. Of course, onecould reply (as would many of my students) that feminism itself no longer exists becauseit is no longer necessary. Clearly there has been the practice of feminist editing, recover-ing texts from obscurity and making them widely available for classroom use to challengeand change the nature of the traditional canon. Do the now post-feminist literary editorsof early modern women writers clamor for a new cladistics redefining the family of textsfrom a feminist perspective to create scholarly editions of early modern women’s texts orwill the existing models created for us by Greg, Bowers, Tanselle, McGann, and theirheirs do just fine? In particular, are there issues raised by early modern women’s manu-script materials which are not usefully addressed by current principles and practices ofediting early modern manuscripts for print? Finally, if one turns to e-editions – surely a‘gender free’ zone, some might think – are there issues arising from the recent history ofthe recovery of early women’s manuscripts about which we should think further?

These are some of the questions about editing early modern women’s manuscriptsabout which I have been thinking over the last decade. As a more or less useless memberof the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions prior to the issuance of the new guidelinesin 2003, I was confronted repeatedly by how different the materials which occupied myeditorial attention were from the editions we were considering for the Committee’s Seal.The challenges faced by the teams of editors producing the definitive multi-volumeeditions of the works of Mark Twain or Herman Melville, the layers upon layers of crosschecking with multiple sources and versions, were impressive. Given that I was workingon early modern women writers for whom in many cases only a single text, either printedor handwritten, was known, such activities also seemed at one level remote and alien.

In fact, the guidelines for vetting a scholarly edition seemed to suggest that producinga truly ‘scholarly’ edition of such types of material as I was working on would be quiteimpossible. By making this observation, I am not calling into question the standardsendorsed by that committee for the production of the most accurate and completeedition possible, but using them to highlight an issue confronting many of us who areworking with early modern manuscript texts, some of course by male writers, butfrequently found in those attributed to early modern women. These are manuscripts thatresist or repel the traditional models for determining how a manuscript should be edited.There are, as I have mentioned, texts for which only a single manuscript version existsand thus the editorial issues are not dealing with collecting variants or deciphering thefinal authorial intention – what type of edition is required for a text for which thesurvival of a unique copy-text is perhaps purely accidental? Are there some early moderntexts that simply cannot, or perhaps even should not, be edited for a print format and withthese texts will an electronic edition solve our problems?

For example, in his 2004 article ‘Textual Transmission’, Adam Smyth raised the issueof the lack of an editorial principle for early modern compilation texts, arguing that to

Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts 103

ª 2010 The Author Literature Compass 7/2 (2010): 102–109, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00682.xJournal Compilation ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

exclude such highly characteristic 17th-century manuscript texts such as miscellaniesperpetuates ‘the author-centric assumptions’ that these very texts deconstruct. Smyth’sinterest is textual variants as they reveal the ‘consumption’ of texts by readers circulatingthe material and as records of how early readers transform manuscript and printed materi-als. He calls along with McGann, McKenzie, and Marotti for a more ‘socialized’ practiceof textual editing…and which considers the circulation of texts’. At the same time, hedismisses the ‘continual (and, generally, continually unfulfilled) promise of hypertexteditions’ as operating to permit readers to navigate between variant versions, but withoutany specific examples of editions he has found unhelpful.1

Even as critics such as Smyth and Marotti call for social editions, there are somefeatures embedded in current models of editorial theory as applied to early modernmanuscripts that seem to me to stand in their way. The late 1980s and 1990s formed animportant period in terms of editorial theory, especially as it relates to manuscript materi-als referred to as ‘records’ or ‘documents’ as opposed to ‘literary’ texts and the relation-ship of manuscript sources to printed, edited versions of them. Thomas Tanselle observedin his essays collected in 1990 under the title Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing that‘writings not intended for publication are fundamentally different in character from thoseintended to be published, by virtue of the fact that, as private documents, there are noconstraints placed on their idiosyncrasy’ (Textual Criticism 6). In his view, significantly forthe type of texts I have in mind, handwritten texts are not ‘rough drafts’ but ‘finishedproducts…and the roughness is simply one of the usual characteristics of this kind ofwriting’ (7). For Tanselle, it is thus important to preserve the ‘precise form present in thedocument’. Handwritten documents are for Tanselle, unless they are scribal copies, bydefault ‘private papers’ – which are by default ‘eccentric’ because there is ‘no obligationto meet any public conventions of decorum or even of intelligibility’. Examples he givesas being ‘characteristics’ of this type of text include ‘false starts, excised words, slips of thepen, peculiar abbreviations, and unusual punctuation’ (7).

Reading his words some twenty years later, one is struck by the vocabulary used todescribe manuscripts: they are ‘rough’ in nature but are not drafts, they defy conventionand decorum, they are eccentric, unusual and peculiar, and they are happily illegiblebecause they are private. Certainly many of the manuscript volumes by 17th-centurywomen, such as Elizabeth Isham’s multiple life narratives in their various forms, or thecomplicated ‘recipe ⁄ autobiography ⁄ record book’ of Anne Glyde could easily fall into thecategory of difficult and peculiar using this perspective. Indeed, those of us who havebeen working on early modern women’s writings over the last two decades are all toofamiliar with the vocabulary of eccentricity or peculiarity used to dismiss the significance,and even the existence, of early modern women’s literary texts from literary history: theywere only semi-literate, which is reflected in their peculiar spelling, punctuation, etc., orthey were only marginally educated, as reflected in their inability to conform to the con-ventions of the genres in which they were ‘attempting’ to write. I have argued elsewherethat in the new narrative of the history of the book, early modern manuscript volumesare being cast in very similar terms as early modern women writers were in the 1980s –either the handwritten volume is ignored as if it does not exist, or it is some odditywhich was as Tanselle suggests ungoverned by the social decorum demanded of ‘real’literature, that is printed works (‘Invisible Books’). This rhetoric of denial or dismissal, ofcourse, is being replaced by a new understanding of early modern literacy for both menand women, and a critical perspective that perhaps writers such as Margaret Cavendishwere not so much unable to write ‘good’, that is conventional, closet dramas or romancefiction as they were exploring, experimenting, and reshaping the genres, but one senses

104 Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts


this dismissive perspective is still very much alive in book history narratives for thisperiod.

The next issue after deciding that a unique manuscript by a woman writer is worthyof a print edition is how to edit it. Tanselle’s observation was that photographic andfacsimile editions were too expensive to be used widely by scholars and also that sucheditions simply transferred to their readers the problem of how to reproduce the textusing ordinary typography when they quote from it (8). For Tanselle, the issue thusbecomes what alterations must be made to the text before it is printed in an edition:significantly, given these conditions, ‘one can take for granted that such physical featuresof the document as the paper, the ink(s), the margins, the spacing of the lines, and so onwill be sacrificed’ (8). One should not forget the simple point that the colloquial meaningof the verb, ‘to edit’ means to alter, adapt, or refine especially to bring about conformityto a standard, and of course, editing thus defined typically involves cutting or deletingmaterials to improve it. The question becomes what elements will be sacrificed in pursuitof editorial conformity and clarity.

The historian Michael Hunter’s essay, ‘How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manu-script: Principles and Practice’, would seem to promise the answers. Published in 1995, itis an interesting essay especially in the context of the changing technologies of textualreproduction: ‘many archives are now available on microfilm or microfiche, and CD-Rom technology also makes possible the reproduction of actual images’, he notes withpleasure, citing in particular ‘the use of electronic media…to make available large collec-tions of material that could otherwise not have been published’, with the 10,000 itemHartlib Papers as his example(‘How To Edit’ 287, 282). However, as with Tanselle, toprint a manuscript is an act of editing out: ‘the transfer of a text from manuscript to printentails an unavoidable degree of transformation: the production of an exact type facsimileof a manuscript document is thus not a proper ambition, even were it feasible’ (287).

Hunter’s most frequently used word in his explanation of how to edit 17th-centurymanuscript texts is the term ‘appropriate’. His first principle of editing manuscripts is todecide ‘what should be published?’ He notes ‘deciding just what is appropriate for publi-cation’, with larger manuscript holdings, ‘is more problematic’ (‘How to Edit’ 284).Diaries and unpublished manuscript books should be published in full in his opinion, butthe ‘miscellaneous compendium of undigested information’ such as the five volumes ofElias Ashmole’s papers printed in 1966 is ‘an example to be avoided’ (284–85). Likewise,‘the archive of the man or woman in question, a collection that is often miscellaneous,disparate and repetitious, organized [by that individual] in a manner that may well not beappropriate for print publication as a whole’ is an example of inappropriate material foreditorial publication although suitable for digitalization, a point to which I shall return(285).

Hunter’s second principle is to determine how the suitable or ‘appropriate’ manuscriptselected should then be ‘treated’ given the needs of its future modern audience. Thisinvolves a consideration of the scholarly rationale for ‘reproducing the original text andthe author’s meaning in it’ (285). ‘Factors have to be weighed up, and decisions made asto exactly which characteristics of the original manuscript are significant and which canbe legitimately discarded in the interests either of enhancing the accessibility of the textto modern readers or of more faithfully encapsulating the author’s intentions’.

Hunter’s essay has been considerably expanded and released in the US in 2007 asEditing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice. He retains, not surpris-ingly, the same criteria for editing manuscript materials expressed in the earlier article. Inhis book length treatment, Hunter is particularly insistent that the study of early modern



manuscripts themselves is central to any one interested in 17th-century texts in general,in particular how they were physically created, circulated, and preserved. That said, healso continues to warn aspiring editors against the ‘type-facsimile’ approach (attemptingto replicate in type the physical layout and appearance of the handwritten version), evenwith electronic editions, noting that ‘undue fidelity to the actual appearance of the origi-nal manuscript may actually obscure an author’s meaning rather than helping to clarify it’(EEMT 85).

A year after Hunter’s original essay appeared, Josephine Roberts in a special issueof Shakespeare Studies (1996) on editing early modern texts in the face of postmoderntheories of the author or lack thereof, observed that ‘the project of recovering women’swriting involves more than simply the process of editing individual authors: it isultimately an attempt to reconstruct a lost manuscript culture’ (70). In contrast to the‘document’ treatment of manuscript materials with its emphasis on clarifying linguisticcontents, this emphasis on the culture of textual production pushes us to consider morethan just the meaning of the words on the page. As discussed earlier, Smyth suggestedthe problem in reconstructing textual transmission was an inadequacy in current editorialimaginations to reproduce socially circulated poems and their variants, but there isanother developing area of manuscript studies which may indeed pose even more intrigu-ing problems for editors. Given the premises about manuscript texts found in Tanselleand Hunter, it would appear that traditional editorial principles will be significantlychallenged by those scholars of handwritten culture as a whole who increasingly arefocusing their attention on the significance of space and the multiple meanings encodedin the physical nature of the manuscript text itself.2

I have repeatedly argued that in the attempt to make early modern manuscripts moreaccessible to modern users, archivists and librarians in their attempts to classify and to pre-serve have in fact obscured texts with their labels such as ‘commonplace book’, ‘recipebook’ and ‘meditations’, what is actually being performed in the text itself (‘RedefiningEarly Women Writers’). These are genres which are particularly associated with thesurviving manuscripts by early modern women and volumes which typically have multi-ple authors contained in them. Related to this attempt to document and classify materials,it seems to me, is the way in which existing theories of the copy-text and editing earlymodern materials are willing to ‘sacrifice’ aspects of the original in pursuit of usability forthe modern reader. Speaking for myself, Hunter’s model lacks the techniques to addressthat group of texts of which he himself observes ‘women seem disproportionately tohave been involved in creating’ such as compendia and the catch-all phrase ‘recipe’ books(EEMMT 20–21). He finds such female ‘compendia’ interesting for the ways in whichthey demonstrate the circulation of information and following Harold Love’s example inScribal Publication, covers all such texts in a paragraph.

More attention is now being paid to ‘messy volumes’ or what I have called ‘books behav-ing badly’. These typically are volumes with multiple authors, functions, and physical for-mats, including multiple hands sharing a single page through inverting the writing surfaceand the creation of layers of annotations and echoing repetitions, which I have argued arepossibly also demonstrating conventions of sharing textual space in a handwritten culture(‘Invisible Books’). Hunter’s insistence that the frequently complex and daunting physicalappearance of early modern handwritten texts is not part of a scholarly edition and is to beavoided further mutes the information that such volumes and such difficult pages present.

Those interested in women’s texts have been raising issues for several years concerningthe ways in which the writer’s meaning is conveyed through a variety of techniques in addi-tion to the content of the letter itself. Early in the 1990s, A. R. Braunmuller had drawn



attention in ‘Accounting for Absence: The Transcription of Space’ to the ways in whichwhite space itself can be ‘manipulated’ for meaning by early modern writers, a positionwhich was explored further in Jonathan Gibson’s ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’.In contrast to Tanselle’s evocation of the roughness and the eccentricity of handwritten doc-uments because of their lack of social decorum, critics such as Suzanne Trill has analyzed theearly modern women’s use of multiple types of handwriting, each signaling ‘different func-tions of each hand, suggesting that the secretary script signaled a formal, public discourse,the italic literariness, and the Gothic a more private, almost secret, code’ (qtd in Burke,1673). In her 2007 essay, ‘Let’s Get Physical: Bibliography, Codiocology, and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscripts’, Victoria Burke also argues that too little attention has beenpaid to McKenzie’s position urging bibliographers to be ‘concerned to show that formseffect meaning’ and I obviously would extend this to editors who are willing to ‘sacrifice’the eccentricities of the page for legibility in print (1667). James Daybell in his authoritativestudies of women’s correspondence likewise draws attention to the consistency with whichearly modern writers and readers ‘considered the social politics of manuscript space in thephysical layout of their letters’.3 This ranged from the placement of the signature on thepage to the width of the margins and the legibility of the handwriting. Not only did theplacement and size of the signature convey socially understood codes, but also Daybellpoints out, ‘the sealing of letters, bound up as it was with authentication and privacy, wasalso fraught with its own distinct set of material considerations’ (10). As Daybell concludes,‘social and cultural meaning was encoded into the very fabric of letters, inscribed into thephysical features of correspondence’ (13).

What the observations of critics who work on early modern women’s manuscriptmaterials highlight are the ways in which their writers used a multiple of spatial conven-tions to convey meaning through means other than the selection of the words on thepage. Such observations challenge editorial belief that meaning relies in the selection ofthe appropriate word, and the editor’s task is to distinguish in a coherent fashion betweenvariants, errors, slips of the pen, and additions enhancing meaning.

Surely, however, the solution to this editorial problem is obvious. Early modernwomen’s manuscripts need e-editions.

Yes, and no. Yes, in the sense that Jerome McGann commented in the 2008 MLAsession on electronic editing, manuscript material, especially the ‘messy’ complicated pagesto which I am referring, must be treated as images rather than text. But, as I sit in theaudience at MLA listening to conference panels discussing the beauties of the electronicedition process, it becomes clear to me that while we increasingly have the ability todigitalize any text we please – although there are certainly grounds for debate how wellthe digitalized images capture the features of the material original – editors do not pleaseto select certain types of material and this is in part because perhaps we are not yetchanging some of the basic assumptions about what an ‘edition’ does, or in Hunter’sterms, what is ‘appropriate’.

When one attends recent MLA conference sessions devoted to digitalizing projects, thevocabulary for those editions include concepts such as ‘archive’ and ‘research platforms’ –embedded, it seems to me, in the concept of a digitalization project are size and quantity,that electronic editions excel in being able to connect materials from several sources andseveral media. As the university press editors who participated in the round table at the2008 MLA on digital publishing agreed, what is marketable in terms of digitalization pro-jects are, as Hunter suggests, editorial projects covering great vast expanses of materials ofvarying natures, and that digitalization in this instance ‘sells’ because of its ability toinclude ‘everything’ and link it in a comprehensible searchable and sustainable system.



Likewise, in a keynote address delivered at a 2008 symposium ‘The Changing Landscapeof Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age’, Donald J. Waters, the program officerfor Scholarly Communications of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, stressed thatsuccessful electronic archives and online editions are so because of their size, scope, andability to be all-inclusive and the types of materials best suited to such treatment are ‘fieldbuilding knowledge’ repositories.

What may get overlooked in this description of the ‘richness’ of contextualization pro-vided by the electronic ‘archive’ model is what is at work in a single, uniquely existingmanuscript which has multiple textual features to which a ‘critical scholarly edition’ suppos-edly would draw attention but is too difficult to be transformed into print, but which alsomay not be a ‘big’ enough project to sustain the creation and ongoing maintenance of anarchive. As any one who has ever worked with electronic editions or archives is well aware,electronic editions involve multiple collaborators with multiple skills, not only to create theedition in the first place, but also to sustain it during rapidly progressing developments intechnology. Electronic editions are not an inexpensive alternative to print – indeed, in therecent MLA sessions devoted to examining electronic editorial practices in specific projects,it was admitted how often editorial decisions pragmatically had to depend on availablefinances concerning what would be included and what would be left out.

These problems in converting ‘messy’ manuscripts where volumes invert, where eighthands share the same writing space on a page, texts which span several generations as well astextual functions, are, of course, issues for those working with texts by early modern men aswell as well as women. And very often such volumes’ spaces are shared by both male andfemale writers. What concerns me is that I hear in the narratives told by the current historyof the book and in the rhetorics of editorial principles and practices for early modern textsthe same types of language which obscured, misrepresented, and ‘lost’ for generations thewritings of early modern women. Because of this easy transference of older critical termsand textual conceptualizations into a new editorial media, I would argue that editors ofelectronic projects, too, still need to be more aware of the significance of the materiality oftexts, of the social conventions of handwritten culture as they may differ from print cultures,and the multiple ways in which these unique, single copy-texts are of interest and value toscholars. Otherwise, we will run the risk of continuing to classify, describe, and edit themin ways that ‘edit’ out the richness and complexity of their ways of communicating. Perhapsthere is still room for a little positive feminist interrogation of editorial principles after all, inthe mutual pursuit of the recovery of textual communities.

Short Biography

Margaret J. M. Ezell is Distinguished Professor of English and the John Paul AbbottProfessor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She is the author of several mono-graphs including The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family, WritingWomen’s Literary History, and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. She was one of thefounders of the early NEH-funded electronic data base and text-encoding project, theBrown Women Writer’s Project, and on the advisory board of The Perdita Project(UK), an electronic data base of early modern women’s manuscripts.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, TAMU 4227, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843,USA. Email: [email protected].



1Fortunately for those interested in collaborative literary miscellanies, Ray Siemens and his colleagues are activelyengaged in thinking about issues posed by manuscript literary miscellanies and their contents for digitalization andtext encoding. See, for example, his forthcoming articles ‘Editing the Early Modern Miscellany: Modeling andKnowledge [Re]Presentation as a Context for the Contemporary Editor’, with Cara Leitch. (forthcoming in NewWays of Looking at Old Texts) and ‘The Devil is in the Details: An Electronic Edition of the Devonshire MS (BritishLibrary Additional MS 17,492), its Encoding and Prototyping’, with Barbara Bond and Karin Armstrong. NewTechnologies and Renaissance Studies.2As we have seen, classical editorial theory as expounded by Tanselle demands that the precise form of the manu-script in question must be preserved – one doesn’t print just the bits one likes and finds interesting – but that printwill necessarily alter it. Hunter likewise feels that using print in an attempt to recreate using print the physicalnature of the manuscript is a waste of time – his concern is how to handle the ‘slips of the pen’, additions, anddeletions without making an unintelligible page filled with carets, strikethroughs, brackets and tiny notations3For a more sustained analysis, see also Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

Works Cited

Braunmuller, A. R. ‘Accounting for Absence: The Transcription of Space.’ New Ways of Looking at Old Texts. Ed.W. Speed Hill. Binghamtom, NY: MRTS, 1993. 47–56.

Burke, Victoria. ‘Let’s Get Physical: Bibliography, Codiocology, and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscripts.’Literature Compass 4 ⁄ 6 (2007): Seventeenth Century section. Blackwell Publishing. 13 Jan. 2010 <http://www.literature-compass.com/newarticle1>.

Daybell, James. ‘Material Meanings and the Social Signs of Manuscript Letters in Early Modern England.’ LiteratureCompass 6 ⁄ 3 (2009): Seventeenth Century section. Blackwell Publishing. 13 Jan. 2010 <http://www.literature-compass.com/newarticle1>.

Ezell, Margaret J. M. ‘Elizabeth Livingstone Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Some Thoughts on Redefining EarlyWomen Writers’ Manuscript Texts.’ English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, III (1992): 216–37.

——. ‘Invisible Books.’ Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, 1650–1800. Eds PatRogers and Laura Runge. Newark: University of Delaware, 2009.

Gibson, Jonathan. ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters.’ The Seventeenth Century 12 (1997): 1–9.Hunter, Michael. ‘How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice.’ The Seventeenth

Century 10 (1995): 277–310.——. Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice. London: Palgrave, 2007.Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995.Roberts, Josephine A. ‘Editing the Women Writers of Early Modern England.’ Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996):

63–70.Smyth, Adam. ‘Textual Transmission, Reception and the Editing of Early Modern Texts.’ Literature Compass 1

(2004): Seventeenth Century section. Blackwell Publishing. 13 Jan. 2010 <http://www.literature-compass.com/newarticle1>.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing. Charlottesville: UVA Press, 1990, p. 6.Trill, Suzanne. ‘A Feminist Critic in the Archives: Reading Anna Walker’s A Sweete Savor for Woman (c. 1606).’

Women’s Writing 9 (2002): 199–214.Waters, Donald J. ‘Archives, Online Edition-Making, and the Future of Scholarly Communications in the Humani-

ties.’ Keynote Address ‘The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age’. 11–13 Feb.Texas A&M University, 2009.

Woudhuysen, H. R. Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.



Documents

Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text